In 1978 Jane Mork Gibson, a historian of technology, worked on the history of the Fairmount Water Works for the Historic American Engineering Record of the Department of Interior. She became fascinated by this iconic building, and tin 1986 she helped mount an exhibit about Fairmount at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, for which a beautiful catalog was produced. Jane was later hired by the Philadelphia Water Department to help them interpret the building's history as it was being resurrected from its abandonment and transformed into the Fairmount Water Works Interpretive Center.

Jane had a dream of expanding her earlier efforts into a much more detailed and accurate history of Fairmount, which served as an integral part of the city's water supply from 1815 until 1909. She completed a first draft of this work before she died in 2016. PWD then hired A. Leonard Pundt to complete the manuscript. Besides inserting footnotes that Jane had not included in her draft, Len was also asked to expand the narrative to include some of the broader context in which Jane was not interested: cultural background, organizational environment, political atmosphere, personal anecdotes that illustrate the personalities of the people involved, and connections between these elements—in short, the things that explain not just the what and when, but also the who and why.  Among his most valuable additions were coverage of the post-water-supply history of Fairmount, including the Aquarium decades, and a detailed history of the building's restoration based on interviews he conducted with many of the people responsible for the work.

• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• Chapter 1. CRISIS AND RESPONSE
• Chapter 2. A BETTER SOLUTION: STEAM ENGINES AT FAIRMOUNT
• Chapter 3. WATER POWER AT FAIRMOUNT
• Chapter 4. EARLY OPERATIONS
• Chapter 5. CELEBRATED SYMBOL OF THE YOUNG REPUBLIC
• Chapter 6. EXPANSION AND CONSOLIDATION
• Chapter 7. RECONSTRUCTION OF THE OLD MILL HOUSE
• Chapter 8. FAIRMOUNT WATER WORKS AT ITS ZENITH
• Chapter 9. TROUBLE ON THE HORIZON
• Chapter 10. DISEASE, ART, AND THE END OF AN ERA
• Chapter 11. CREATION OF THE  AQUAIRUM
• Chapter 12. DECLINE OF THE AQUARIUM
• Chapter 13. UNCERTAINTY AND RESTORATION
• Chapter 14. RENAISSANCE
• EPILOGUE
• BIBLIOGRAPHY